Someone Bought the Vote, and $20M of $BONK Walked Out the Door 🗳️💸

The decentralized autonomous organization governing the Solana-based memecoin $BONK confirmed Monday that an attacker drained an estimated $20 million from its treasury by passing a malicious on-chain governance proposal. According to the project's official X account @bonk_inu, the proposal authorized a direct transfer of 4.426 trillion BONK tokens from the BonkDAO treasury, with the BONK team stating it has notified law enforcement and is coordinating with centralized exchanges, network bridges, and the Solana Foundation to recover funds and identify those responsible.

On-chain analysis from Chainalysis, Lookonchain and independent investigators shows the attacker submitted the proposal, titled "BIP #76 - Sowellian BonkDAO," on June 30. To clear quorum the proposal needed yes votes equal to 1% of BONK's supply. Between July 4 and 5, an affiliated wallet spent roughly $4.4 million to accumulate BONK on Bybit and Binance and, according to one account, borrowed additional tokens through DeFi lending platforms. The proposal passed with just seven wallets voting against more than 18,000 non-voting members, a 2.9% turnout, clearing the 879.95 billion BONK threshold by a margin of 882.38 billion. According to one blockchain expert, "Basically $4M worth of BONK was used by the drainer to vote YES for taking $21M worth of BONK tokens from the DAO."

The transfer was executed around 4:00 a.m. ET on Monday, moving the 4.4 trillion BONK, valued at $19.3 million at the time, to a Solana address ending in "JHvQ" that Solscan traced to funding via a Bybit account. That wallet has not distributed the tokens to other parties as the proposal suggested; instead it forwarded the holdings around 3:30 p.m. ET to a second Solana address ending in "eh42." South Korean exchange Upbit cited "user protection measures following the circumstances of a security incident" after suspending BONK deposits and withdrawals, and American exchange Kraken also paused BONK trading functionality to assist recovery efforts.

The BONK price fell between 7% and 10% over 24 hours following the disclosure, trading near $0.0000043 to $0.0000054398 depending on the venue, roughly 93% below its all-time high of $0.000058. Analysts including Web3 security researcher Taylor Monahan criticized the governance configuration that allowed the drain, arguing that direct treasury transfers should require a timelock or multiple approvals rather than being executable by a single passing proposal with liquid token-weighted voting. Security firms have flagged the event as part of a broader wave of crypto exploits that reached a record high in the first half of 2026, and BonkDAO has indicated recovery efforts remain ongoing.